Indonesia executes 4 drug convicts, Gurdip Singh spared

Indonesia yesterday executed four drug convicts, three of them foreigners, by firing squad, an official said, pushing on with a campaign of capital punishment that has sparked a storm of global anger. However, ten others expected to have faced the firing squad, including nationals from Pakistan, India and Zimbabwe as well as Indonesians, were not put to death.

 

48-year-old India Gurdip Singh was spared. India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had stated that the government was trying to stop his execution. He was found guilty by an Indonesian court for trying to smuggle in 300 grams of heroin and was handed death penalty in 2005.

 

"Indian Ambassador in Indonesia has informed me that Gurdip Singh whose execution was fixed for last night, has not been executed," MEA Minister Sushma Swaraj said on twitter. 

 

However, it was not clear why the Indian was not executed while four other convicts were put to death by the firing squad. MEA Spokesperson Vikas Swarup had yesterday said that Indian Embassy officials in Jakarta were reaching out to the Indonesian foreign office and the senior leadership of the country on the issue.

 

"Afdhal Muhammad, the legal representative of Singh was of the view that he can file for Presidential clemency under the relevant law before the President of Indonesia. The Embassy sent a Note Verbale to Indonesia's Foreign Ministry requesting that all legal recourse should be exhausted before the death penalty is carried out," Swarup said.

 

Officials did not give a reason for the reprieve, but the prison island where they were expected to be executed was hit by a major storm as the other sentences were carried out.

 

The executions came after days of protests with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the European Union voicing opposition to the plan.

 

It was the first round of executions in Indonesia since April last year when authorities put to death eight drug convicts, including two Australians, which sparked international outrage. Friday's executions came after a day of frenetic activity, with distraught relatives travelling to Nusakambangan island to say farewells to their loved ones and ambulances carrying coffins over to the heavily guarded penal colony. 

 

Two people whose cases had raised high-profile international concern among rights groups were not executed. The first was Pakistani Zulfiqar Ali, whom rights groups say was beaten into confessing to the crime of heroin possession, leading to his 2005 death sentence. The other was Indonesian woman Merri Utami, who was caught with heroin in her bag as she came through Jakarta airport and claims she was duped into becoming a drug mule.

 

It was the third batch of executions under President Joko Widodo and means 18 drug convicts -- mostly foreigners --have been put to death since he became the leader in 2014. Widodo has defended dramatically ramping up the use of capital punishment, saying that Indonesia is fighting a war on drugs and traffickers must be heavily punished.